---
title: Cloudways Launches Managed Hosting for AI Agents
description: The DigitalOcean-owned platform now offers managed deployment for the open-source OpenClaw and Hermes agent runtimes.
date: 2026-08-18T00:00:00.000Z
category: software-news
tags: cloudways, digitalocean, ai-agents
---

Cloudways, a DigitalOcean subsidiary, launched general availability of Managed AI Agents on August 18,
offering hosted deployment for two open-source agent runtimes, OpenClaw and Hermes, without requiring
customers to manage the underlying servers themselves.

## What the product does

Managed AI Agents removes the setup work of deploying and maintaining virtual private servers,
containers, gateways, and ports for running an AI agent in production, with isolated environments for
each deployment, according to
[Cloudways' own announcement](https://www.cloudways.com/blog/cloudways-managed-ai-agents-is-generally-available/).
OpenClaw and Hermes, the two supported runtimes at launch, are both open-source projects with
substantial existing developer adoption, more than 386,000 and 228,000 GitHub stars respectively, per
Cloudways. The company says support for additional open-source agents is planned.

## The quote

"Running AI agents [should be] just as simple and reliable as deploying any other workload," said
Suhaib Zaheer, SVP Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean and general manager at Cloudways, describing the
offering as a step toward that goal.

## Why it matters

The gap this targets is real: plenty of teams can get an open-source agent running on a laptop but
stall out on the production concerns, isolation, uptime, server management, that turn a prototype into
something reliable. Packaging that as managed hosting is a fairly conventional infrastructure play, but
doing it specifically for agent runtimes, rather than general compute, is a bet that "AI agent hosting"
becomes its own distinct product category rather than staying a niche use of general cloud hosting.
Whether that bet pays off depends on how many teams are actually stuck at the production step Cloudways
is targeting, which isn't something this announcement alone can confirm.

What to watch: usage and adoption numbers once Cloudways reports on them, and whether competitors
launch comparable agent-specific hosting products.

More [Software News](/software-news/) coverage, or everything tagged [ai-agents](/tag/ai-agents/).